Misogynistic schmuck week

Misogynistic Schmuck Week has been declared in Australia. If you missed the commemorative poster, never mind. You can get straight into the celebrations by this piece in the National Times from Paul Sheehan and Bob Ellis’ infamous rant in The Drum.

If you can’t read the banner because of the high winds, the campaign slogan is “women are a bunch of whingers and feminism has failed”. As standard-bearers, Sheehan and Ellis elected themselves.

With his considerable experience of being a woman in the military, earlier this week Bob Ellis weighed into the recent scandal at ADFA, with the suggestion that if women can’t cope with a bit of sexual abuse, humiliation and harassment from their fellow soldiers, they’re not tough enough to fight for their country in a war.

Revolutionary thinking; when a soldier engages in the premeditated debilitation of a compatriot soldier, traditionally we don’t question the victim’s bravado.

Traditionally, we describe the act with words like “treason”, and dishonourably discharge perpetrators - or send them to jail.

There is, of course, a significant difference for Bob Ellis in this case.

I just can’t help feeling that anyone who has signed up to potentially die for their country deserves a little more gratitude than Bob Ellis telling them to cop an invidious sexual assault with a “toughen up” attitude.

Even if they do have tits. I must be a communist, or something.

What has happened to Old Bob to make him believe that the be-titted amongst us should be considered so differently to men?

It could be centuries of patriarchal culture. Or maybe he’s been reading Paul Sheehan.

Paul Sheehan’s NT article from Monday is interesting because while containing not a lick of logical sense it still manages to be misogynist pap.

Sheehan’s argument runs:

Women like shoes, and pay a lot for them, but women haven’t achieved equality because they hate one another because they’re all insecure. Someone called Betty Friedan wrote a book about women and she shouldn’t have, because she wasn’t an academic, she was a journalist and therefore shouldn’t have an opinion, but western feminist academics are all wrong anyway. Wow, how nasty is the Third World? Shoes, it’s so unfair men can’t have babies. The end.

I shouldn’t really pick on him for his article making no sense. I should pick on him for lifting material from two separate articles in The New Yorker, on

Betty Friedan and shoes, and then mashing them together merely to belittle feminists and bump up his word-count.

It’s revealing that his argument bashes a straw woman (in this case, Betty Friedan, now dead five years) with such a logic-obfuscating viciousness that Sheehan even gets the name of her book wrong. It’s “The Feminine Mystique”, Paul.

“The Feminist Mystique” is something quite different. It’s the perplexing mystery obsessing Paul Sheehan as to why there are still feminists in the world given that heaps-clever-journalist men like him repeatedly remind us feminism has failed.

Here’s some news: the reason feminism is still going is because you bovver boys of the commentariat failed. With all the evidence in the world of the inequalities in front of you, you lot didn’t step up your game, you didn’t develop a moral conscience and you never sacrificed an inch of your sense of entitlement.

Your rhetoric excuses the structures and perpetrators of oppression and discrimination, so society gets left with the oppressive, discriminatory results: the ongoing pay gap, the second-shift in the home, the sexual abuses and the unequal opportunities that stifle the talent and enterprise of those unlucky enough to be born with ovaries instead of dicks - for - brains.

The only mistake feminism made was to think better of you – to think we could all stop fighting because we’d managed to change the world already.

The rising generation of feminists are slyly watching the floats of Misogynistic Schmuck Week pass by. Let it be known; we will not be making the old mistakes again.